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Tuesday, December 23, 2014

Tuesday night class #2 - How to love your enemy.

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I apologize for net posting a new class every Tuesday is was originally promised. My goal from now on is to post the class on a regular basis every Tuesday. I appreciate your concern about the lapse in classes. Your concern leaves me with the impression that you are interested in the Tuesday evening class and look forward to the posts.

Any other feedback about your degree of satisfaction with the material informant would be much appreciated.

The idea of humor as an antidote to enmity is very significant. When we lose our sense of humor and take ourselves or tragedy too seriously we are in trouble. You either laugh or cry as the saying goes. Of course we need to do both. There is a place for moral outrage, but we should always reserve some space for the awareness that human life on the ego plane is absurd, people are stupid, and while ignorance may be bliss, awareness can make life very interesting and if not taken seriously, amusing as hell. Jesus, as you point out, laughed at His own execution. It was a joke really. Even though in pain it doesn't seem that He took it all that seriously. He could have escaped had He wanted to and yet He stayed and played a role in the drama which has become a totalizing story shaping human kind for millenia.

Having been raised as an Evangelical Christian I was taught that there were two kinds of people in the world: the saved and the unsaved. The unsaved were excluded from the Kingdom of Heaven and were targets either of fear because they would tempt us to sin and damnation or conversion. In other words, people not saved were enemies and "bad" and we were God's favorites and "good".

As a child this was an easy world to navigate but as I grew older I became suspicious that the world wasn't this simple and wondered what kind of a God this was that we were told to worship.

As I became an adult I became convinced that there was a divine spark in every person and that God loved everybody. I then began to question the church that would teach such destructive beliefs about "us" and "them", the worthy because of adherence to some creed, and the unworthy who didn't share the same belief. And I began to understand the premordial sin which is hate and exclusion of our brothers and sisters of humanity.

As I got even older I realized that what most Christian churches teach isn't Christian in the sense that Jesus never taught what they are teaching. How could a God who says "love your enemies" condemn people to hell? He wouldn't, and couldn't if He was to be true to Himself.

And lately I have moved to Unitarian Universalism because they espouse the value of the inherent worth and dignity of every person. And I think Jesus would be very pleased.

if I understand it correctly in a Course in Miracles it states that the crucifixion of Jesus was not to die for human being sins but rather to demonstrate that spirit is stronger and more important than the body. Wow Jesus's body died his spirit rose above his corporal death end continue then to the cosmic consciousness. Jesus demonstrated the inherent worth and dignity of human beings by maintaining his worth and dignity even as he was tortured and executed. When I was a kid there was a saying sticks and stones can break my bones but words can never hurt me. I think this was what Jesus was trying to demonstrate when he died on the cross.

The inherent worth and dignity is something that we are all born with in manifest in our corporal bodies which as a Roman Catholic I was Todd is the temple of the Holy Spirit.

I find great hope and inspiration in the Unitarian Universalist first principle which he asks us to covenant together to a firm and promote the inherent worth and dignity of every person. As we deal with the brutality of police on America streets particularly against our black brothers and sisters. Overall plan our black brothers we need to read reminded continually that power and control to subjugate and I'll press a class of people is not acceptable. Police officers who in- discriminately in the step of a moment shoot unarmed black males need to be held accountable for their heinous crimes. All Unitarian Universalists need to stand in solidarity with our black brothers as well as all people in the United States and around the world against brutal police force exercise under the guise of governmental control.

Thank you for the opportunity to express these opinions in your Tuesday night class.